


Throwing Edith Wharton Down the Stairs and other stuff students wish they could get away with

by cinderellasleftshoe



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, Secret Relationship, faculty meetings are madness, profesor castiel, profesor dean
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 04:58:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12291747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinderellasleftshoe/pseuds/cinderellasleftshoe
Summary: Two professors, one is enigmatic, the other a holy terror. They hate each other, and students and faculty alike avoid their epic conflicts. Which suits our heroes just fine.





	Throwing Edith Wharton Down the Stairs and other stuff students wish they could get away with

**Author's Note:**

> This is the 2nd fun weekend writing #challenge in the Destiel NaNoWriMo FB group. Thank you to my lovely warrior friends in that group for many moments that made a hugely busy week bearable. They're the best!!
> 
> Prompt 1: We’re both professors in the same department and it enhances your reputation with the students as a mysterious enigma and my reputation as a stone-cold terror if we pretend to hate each other, plus when we back each other up on department meetings everybody’s so surprised they give in right away.

At noon, the doors on the first, second, and third floors opened, and classes of students streamed out into the sunlit, spiraling, federalist stairwells of Lewis Hall. Some called greetings up and down to each other, while others snugged their headphones over their ears and focused determinedly on getting to their next class.

"Kelsey! That's a great shirt!" a petite young woman with long black hair and a Northface backpack leaned over the balcony railing and called down to another student one floor below.

Kelsey leaned over the balcony, threw her head back looking up and laughed like raindrops, pure and light. "Thanks! It's new! I didn't feel like doing laundry!"

Students up and down the stairs around the two women cheered and applauded in solidarity. Gathering your clothes together, hauling them to the laundry rooms, and waiting around for them while trying to do your math homework and making sure no one steals your underpants from the washer really is a pain.

Dr Novak, the Director of the Creative Writing program, pulled his battered leather satchel closer to his body as he threaded the students on the stairs, slipping between them with ease, and still managing to avoid eye contact. In so many ways, he was the stereotype of an arty professor: skinny black jeans, black button downs, and black linen tailored sports coats. Black high tops, black leather bracelets, black nail polish, black Wayfarer sunglasses, black arm tattoos, and on most occasions, a bit of black eyeliner smudged along his lash lines. If you lined up all the professors in the English department (But don’t do that. No, really. First of all, getting a group of professors to do any one single thing is an exercise in herding senile cats, and second of all, getting them all in one place is a terrible idea. Don’t believe me? Go ahead. Try it. You’ll see.) and had to choose the one who teaches experimental narratives (seriously, why are you doing this?), your eye would easily fall on Dr Castiel Novak. Of course, that guy would teach something esoteric. Esoteric means “weird,” for all you non-English majors who think lining professors up together and trying to get anything done is a good idea.

As Dr Novak reached the second-floor landing, he ran smack into his nemesis, Dr Dean Winchester, the 20th century Americanist. The copy of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence that Winchester had been carrying, was knocked free of his hands, and every occupant of the stairwell stopped as that revered book rolled and bounced down the stairs, hitting one wooden stair at a time: bang, bang, bang, bang-ing its way to the bottom. The entire stairwell had been pulled into suspended animation as students froze in place, caught up in the drama of what happens when an enigmatic rock of a creative writer meets the hard place of a surly and narcissistic Americanist. In one motion, students plastered themselves against the stairwell walls in a bid to both watch the show and stay out of the way of the inevitable detonation between these two well-known enemies.

Dr Winchester’s eyes narrowed, and he crossed his strong, blue and grey plaid-clothed arms over his wide chest. 

“Professor Novak!” he roared.

Dr Novak’s posture went rigid, and he allowed a touch of cool sneer to enter his tone in response, “yes, Professor Winchester?”

“Show some respect and watch where you’re fucking going!”

Novak cocked his head to one side in a bird-like movement, stared into Winchester’s eyes a brief moment, and then shoved by him to continue making his way down the stairs. When he got to the bottom, he picked up the book where it had fallen and casually tossed it back up to Dr Winchester, “teach something besides moth-eaten, post-war, white people angst, and I might.” Then he disappeared down the hall.

Winchester spun on his heel and tore back up the stairwell, students scattering as he went.

***

The monthly plenary of the voting faculty gathered in the fifth floor Faculty Reading Room of Lewis hall. The room smelled like leather club chairs and old books, which is should, since it was furnished in leather sofas and club chairs and the walls were lined in bookcases full of books published by the esteemed faculty who had occupied Lewis Hall for more than 150 years.

This agenda was short, with only two items to discuss and vote on: adding a new rhetoric course to the regular course offerings, and approaching the dean to ask for a new tenure line in creative writing. These were routine matters, so the meeting should have been short, but it wasn’t going to be because the last new tenures line had gone to literature and linguistics, but the two tenure lines before that had been creative writing. Creative Writing as a discipline was a growing interest with students, as the Creative Writing faculty partnered with the rhetoric faculty and the computer science faculty to offer interesting-to-students (and marketable job skills) courses in podcasting, video game narrative and gameplay, and the creative nonfiction of blogging. The other faculty were restless about the rapid growth of the creative writing major and the potential for the unit to tilt the power balance in what had been for 150 years, a literature-centric English department. Feelings were fraught.

Ten minutes into the meeting it was clear things would get acrimonious. Dr Warren Snead, the Victorian, sneered his way through a “point of order,” arguing that the request for a new tenure line had been improperly proposed. And that “video game shenanigans” had “no business in a classical education.” Dr Rene Marx waxed on at length about the citizenship value of the liberal arts education, while sending pointed and only barely veiled barbs about robots in Dr Novak’s direction.” Professors shifted in their seats and took up side-conversations, some agreeable but many hostile. Department chairwoman, Dr Arabelle Chinchilla, pinched the bridge of her nose, as whispered speculations about when this whole thing was going to explode rolled through the chatter across the room. 

“Winchester!” Dr Novak sneered, rising to his feet, posture aggressively forward, tone brittle and sharp like shards of glass, “I beg your pardon?!”

“I said,” Dr Winchester sneered back, rising to his feet as well, tone molten and inflamed with ire, “you’re teaching a bunch of New Age crap, turning this venerated English department into a trade school!”

“Are you calling Creative Writing a trade?” Novak gasped, one hand fluttering in shock.

Winchester pressed his hand to his chest in mockery, “I am calling it nothing-so-useful. I’m telling you that you think just because your program’s classes are popular, and you’ve brought 100 new students into the department in the last two years, that your shit doesn’t stink. But all that fangirling and fanboying of the students over your arty clothes, your messy hair, and your baby blues doesn’t make you a scholar. You’re still just a weirdo hack whose books read like you take bad acid and then document your trips through the Pretentious Weirdo-Land.”

“Hack!? At least I’ve published something in the last year. The authors in your curriculum are as tired and commodified as mid-century sunburst wall hangings!”

Both men turned their bodies squarely into each other and locked eyes in what was sure to be an epic stare down they were known for. 

Dr Snead had ceded his interest in the point of order issues the moment Novak had started shouting and Dr Chinchilla twitched her shoulders in anxiety. Time to move this along. She shot a look at her longtime friend, Dr Banger, and Banger nodded back and quickly called the question of asking the dean to add a tenure line in Creative Writing and allow the faculty to begin the lengthy hiring process. The vote passed unanimously. Chinchilla closed the meeting in a rush. The room emptied in record time, all the while Novak and Winchester were both still on their feet, arms still crossed over their chests, dark glares firmly in place on their faces.

The heavy doors closed and Novak walked over to the first one, turned the lock and then jiggled the doorknob to be sure. Yep. Locked. Then he walked to the second door at the other side of the room and repeated the process.

Winchester was on him in a moment, pressing Novak’s back against the door, and whispering low and dirty in Novak’s ear, “wall hangings, babe? That’s what you went with? Are you tryna be a gay stereotype?” and he licked a slow, hot stripe up the tendons along the side of Novak’s throat.

“I got distracted! Dr Baker was staring at your ass! She’s like 100 years old, I had no idea she had a thing for you.”

“Lizzie Baker is a smart woman, and you know how I feel about smarty pantses…” Dean squeezed Cas’ ass hard enough to leave little red marks.

“Apparently you think smarty pantses got that way through dropping acid… which, well that one book, so, you know, thanks for that Mr I Cant Keep a Secret.”

“Hey! You threw my woman, Edith Wharton, down the stairs!”

“She’s angsty, Dean! All the uppercrust angst!”

Both men fell into each other laughing.

Novak spoke again, pressing butterfly kisses to Winchester’s face, “seriously, thank you. My creative writing teachers and I are overwhelmed with all the new students, and we could really use the help.”

“I know, baby. You’ve been working too hard. When we do the campus visits for the candidates, let’s plot a blowup so big over the two candidates we like the best that we cause the rest of our colleagues to decide to run to the dean and beg her to hire both candidates before we burn the building down over it.”

Cas pulled back from kissing Dean’s neck to look into his eyes, “that’s a great idea! That would help out SO MUCH! I love it, Dean! Thank you!!”

Dean pulled Cas into a bruising hug that lingered into something romantic and sweet. Then, he pulled back, kissed Cas softly on the tip of his nose, pressed their foreheads together, and said in a heavy murmur that suggested bourbon, humid southern nights, and fireflies, “what else are secret husbands for?”

And they lived happily ever after.

**Author's Note:**

> #sorrynotsorry to all my professor friends. You know faculty meetings are a mess <3 
> 
> Thanks for your kudos and kindness, I'm having so much fun with these short challenges :D


End file.
